sensory store - information from our senses such as what we can hear feel etc.

Short term memory - anything that our senses have found interesting is encoded then will pass to this store

Long term memory - if information has been rehearsed it will pass to this store.

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Research into Sensory Store

The sensory Store

Sperling(1960). participants saw a grid of digits and letters for 50 milliseconds. they were asked to write down either all 12 items or they would hear a tone immediately after and they should write down that row.

Example

7 1 V F High tone

X L 5 3 Medium Tone

B 4 W 7 Low Tone

when asked to report the whole thing recall was poorer ( 5 items recalled, about 42%) than when asked to give just one row ( 3 items recalled, 75%) thus showing us that information decays rapidly in the sensory store.

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Serial Position Effect

Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) showed that, if you give participants a list of about 20 words, presenting them one at a time, then ask them to recall any words they can remember, you can observe an intresting effect.

Participants tend to remember the words from the words from the start of the list (a primacy effect) and from the end of the list (a recency effect) but are less good at recalling the weords in the middle.

Primicay effect occurs because the first words are rehearsed and transferred to LTM.

Recency effect occurs beacuse these words are in STM when you start recalling the list.